Mark Twain once wrote that truth is stranger than
fiction. In our day, the true threats to our civilization are far darker than
the fictions of Stephen King or Dean Koontz and more unspeakable than any
Halloween monster. The fantasies of the horror genre, however, can play an
underappreciated but constructive role in drawing attention to the reality.
For generations, spoilsports have incessantly decried
the supposed spiritual harm of Halloween and the horror genre it springs from.
Some of the most prominent critics of this custom and its art form are members
of Protestant sects who see it as the work of the Devil - yet the greater danger
lies in its failure to recognize the reality of his influence and combat it,
which is a necessity that the dark fantasies of the horror genre focus our
attention upon. There are genuine misuses of the horror genre – including some
cases which may represent a threat to the human soul – but it is much more helpful
to develop clear litmus tests for dividing the good from the bad, rather than
resorting to blanket, knee-jerk condemnations. Since the days of Luther and
Calvin, Protestants have been prone to these kinds of histrionic outbursts of
panic, a pattern which has contributed to many of the misguided crusades of the
last few centuries, ranging from the Salem Witch Trials to the demographic doom
of Thomas Malthus to the Red Scare to Prohibition. The Protestant loathing of
Halloween ultimately arises from the same defect: a one-sided obsession with
seeing nothing but evil in anything than can be misused for evil purposes,
which requires a lot less rigorous thinking than restoring the right use of a
thing. Catholicism, in contrast, has been less prone to such fanaticism. This
may be due in part to the influence of medieval philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas
and his followers, who wedded the thought of the ancient Greeks to Christianity
in a process now wryly referred to as “The Baptism of Aristotle.” The Thomist philosophers
recognized that objects are not intrinsically evil of themselves, but only
become evil when they are not used in the right manner, proportion, place or
time. A Thomist analysis of the horror genre and the modern custom of Halloween
demonstrates that they can be surprisingly useful in the right circumstances.
One of those surprising uses it to maintain psychological health. G.K.
Chesterton, a London journalist who was the 20th Century’s leading literary
defender of Catholicism, once wrote that fairy tales restored him to sanity by demonstrating
that monsters are not invincible:
“Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing
in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the
child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because
it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of
bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible
defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an
imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the
dragon.”
“Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms
him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had
a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that
there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger
than strong fear.”[1]
The custom of Halloween serves the same purpose, by
allowing a child to feel as powerful as a monster for a day, by putting on the
costume of a werewolf or swamp creature. I’m certain that scores of other
defenses can cited for Halloween (some of which may even be supported by our
modern psychologists in spite of the fact that they are true) on purely secular
grounds. Yet the most potent case for the horror genre can be made on grounds
that are entirely religious and completely orthodox. The horror genre is
usually criticized by members of unorthodox sects who claim to draw all of
their inspiration from the Bible, yet ignore the fact that it contains a ghost
story. In 1 Samuel 28, the Jewish king Saul commands a witch to call up the
spirit of the dead prophet Samuel, thereby defiling his own soul. In addition
to witches, the occult and communications from the dead, the Bible also refers
routinely to personal appearances by the Devil and a plethora of supernatural
events of different types, including demonic possession. Fr. Malachi Martin,
the leading exorcist in America until his death in 1999, said many times that
the latter phenomenon is so horrific that movies like The Exorcist pale in comparison to the reality. Christians are far
more likely to watch The Passion of the
Christ, but this is really the
quintessential horror film: like the Bible, it contains direct manifestations
of demons, as well as gore, senseless violence and the most ghastly crime in
history: deicide.
This
was an offense of such magnitude that its effects have rippled across human
history for two thousand years and will continue to do so as long as humans
walk the earth. Horror fiction predated it, but no human writer could have
dreamt up such an audacious crime as the murder of God himself by his own
creations; yet truth, as Twain said, is stranger than fiction. Many other types
of fantasy have had their brief moments in the sun, such as Westerns, which
were wildly popular among Americans in the middle of the last century but have
now faded into a distant memory. Yet the horror genre has been with us since
the dawn of human civilization and shows no more sign of dying anytime soon
than Michael Myers does. The genre is essentially undead, if you will. It is
timeless in part because its most effective stories deal directly with matters
of the soul, which are eternal questions. The stakes are simply far higher than
in any other genre, which contributes to the tension that is necessary to keep
readers and viewers coming back for more. A gunslinger murdered in an Old West
shootout lost his life, but in the horror genre, he may lose his soul and
suffer eternal damnation; a lover in a romance tale may suffer a broken heart,
but in a horror tale, they may suffer unending pain in a place where the “where
the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.”[2]
The stick is unbearable and the carrot,
eternal bliss, is irresistible. When the horror genre goes wrong, it is often
by focusing only on the stick without even mentioning the carrot, which creates
the subtle and quite false impression that Hell is a fate one cannot avoid. This sweeps under the carpet the ultimate
lesson of the Passion of the Christ, the beautiful truth that even death itself
cannot prevent the just from reaching their reward. Except for this single
film, the rest of the fiction put out by the explicitly religious genre falls into
the opposite trap of ignoring the distinct possibility of damnation – which is
precisely why series like Seventh Heaven feel so unrealistic and trite. In our
generation, virtually all of the clergy of every denomination have watered down
Christianity to a mere Disney movie; the handful of them who speak of the very
real dangers of Hell fall into an even worse trap of mentioning only mortal
sins that are common among unpopular people. Attend any church this Sunday and
you will listen in vain for a sermon against mortal sins that are common among
the rich, the popular, the powerful and the beautiful, such as divorce, usury,
speculation and birth prevention. If you search hard, you might still hear an
old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone sermon against homosexuality, for example, but
none warning business owners and corporate executives against deliberately
driving down wage rates. Today’s right-wing Republicans would be shocked to
discover that the latter is in the same class as the homosexuality they rage
against so loudly, among the four “sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance.”[3]
Many of today’s religious leaders wrongly downplay the topics of sin and
damnation in favor of a weak, therapeutic version of the Gospel, but judging
from the sheer frequency with which Jesus and all the other characters in the
Bible mention them, this is the wrong approach. It is now taboo in our churches
to mention the necessity to toil each and every day to remake one’s own soul.
The only faint reminders of this can be found in the horror genre, which is
fiction that points towards frightening realities that everyone must confront.
They are not being confronted because the people in charge of educating the
public are consciously substituting fluff for the faith – a development which
is itself a true horror story, because it was prophesied long ago.
The Functions of Fright
The horror genre is useful at another basic level,
beyond just focusing the minds of human beings on their last end: reminding them
of the reality of the supernatural. Many of the monsters who appear time and
again in tales of terror are purely creations of fantasy, such as werewolves
and vampires. We must not forget that we are dealing with fictional
entertainment, so this kind of artistic license is entirely permissible, but it
certainly doesn’t signify that all of
the subject matter discussed in the category is baseless. Nor do hoaxes. As
Chesterton put it so succinctly, “The fact that ghosts prefer darkness no more
disproves the existence of ghosts than the fact that lovers prefer darkness
disproves the existence of love...A false ghost disproves the reality of ghosts
exactly as much as a forged banknote disproves the existence of the Bank of
England - if anything, it proves its existence.”[4]
It takes much more energy to discriminate between true and false claims, which
is why weak thinkers tend to fall back on the suffocating dogma that all supernatural phenomena are fictional.
This irrational outlook is prevalent among professors of natural science
precisely because it makes the subject matter they are proficient in appear
more important than it really is, yet irrational skeptics of this kind would be
hard pressed to explain away some of the hard evidence in favor Christianity. Some
of it has occurred in the public eye, like the Marian apparitions at Fatima in
1917, or under the careful eye of skeptical atheist scientists, such as the
innumerable miraculous cures at Lourdes which independent analysts cannot
refute. [5]
Anybody can go visit the tombs of many saints whose incorruption likewise
cannot be explained by scientific means. That might be a ghastly and morbid pilgrimage
save for the fact that their incorruption would make it less ghastly and morbid
than it ought to be. Ironically, the proliferation of atheism in the last century
and a half was its prophesied in Jude 1:18, as the current massive decline of
religious faith in Western civilization was in Matthew 24:9-24:14; every
atheist, heretic and apostate proves the truth of the supernatural by their
very existence. It is much more pleasant to talk about similar passages which
are not recognized as prophecies, even though they are fulfilled every time a
Catholic prays the Rosary. One case in point is Luke 1:48-49, for it is a
verifiable historical fact that from the day of the Immaculate Conception, all
generations have called St. Mary blessed, as everyone who prays the Rosary
does; another is Judith 13:25, for the trust that Judith showed really hasn’t
passed from the memories of men, but still reminds them all of the power of God
every time they pray the Scriptural Rosary.
This is the pleasant way of proving the supernatural,
but if the carrot fails, we can resort to pointing at the stick. In order to be
a Christian, one must accept that ghosts, witches, demons, angels and spirits
are all a concrete part of reality, for both the Bible and the Catholic Church
affirm this. It is no accident that from the beginning, human history is
replete with reports of these particular manifestations of the supernatural,
but few eyewitness accounts of vampires, werewolves, dragons, leprechauns and
other creatures that purport to be anything but fantasy. Skeptics may not
recognize the difference between these two distinct classes of supernatural
tales, but they cannot discount some of the practical observations other
respected scientists have made on their own, in experiments which could
probably be replicated easily. Numerous proofs come from the discipline of
psychology, including the research of respected psychologists like Dr. Karl
Menninger, the high rate of usage of occult paraphernalia in mental wards and
the most overlooked, glaring aspect of some forms of mental illness: why is it
that so many delusions are blasphemous in nature? Another unpleasant proof is
the severe reactions of some patients when clergy have carried Eucharists and
other holy objects concealed on their persons into mental wards. At a far
deeper level, why is it that we see humans exhibiting real extremes of
saintliness like Mother Teresa or committing barbaric crimes like Joseph
Stalin, whereas animals never go against their instincts, let alone to this extent? One of
the many proofs of the existence of a human soul is that people never act like
animals; they are always better or worse. Dolphins are intelligent enough to
invent perversions every bit as sick as a human’s, but they do not, nor do we
see apes forgoing food and shelter in order to pray for the salvation of a gorilla,
unlike our monks and nuns. Until the day we are free from suffering the effects
of evils inflicted by others, or the far worse menace of choosing evil
ourselves, we must recognize the risk associated with choosing the dark side.
That will be the same day we enter Heaven, which will never occur if we listen
to skeptics and bad clergy who turn to the dark side every time they downplay
it.
It is exceptionally difficult for an atheist to cling
to their faithlessness when confronted tangible evidence of the supernatural,
which is precisely why the Devil doesn’t give it to them; if he’s not bothering
you in any way, it’s probably because he’s already got you. Once the existence
of the supernatural is confirmed, however, a person’s soul may still be endangered
by the opposite extreme of believing falsehoods about it. As Chesterton and
fellow English apologist Arnold Lunn pointed out in detail, simply believing in
the existence of spirits does not make their messages worth listening to, for
not all of them are benevolent. The blind may fall into the ditch on the
opposite side of the road, so to speak, by consulting mediums, recourse to
witchcraft or the like. Rather than seeking the protection of a guardian angel,
they may seek favors from fallen angels, thereby leading to demonic obsession
or possession by corrupting a person’s soul. The spiritual side effects of
dealing with the dark side are dealt with in Leviticus 19:26, 31, which warns, "Do
not turn to mediums or seek out spiritists, for you will be defiled by them. I
am the Lord your God." There are plenty of hoaxers among today’s mediums
and spiritists, but the real hazard comes from the sheer ignorance of the genuine
practitioners who understand next to nothing about how the supernatural world
really operates, including the existence of malevolent spirits. It is
permissible for a Christian to ask an angel or a saint to pray with them (not to them) for some worthy goal, or even
to recognize an apparition of the dead sent back for some good purpose (under
strictly controlled circumstances), but in the occult, the relationship is reversed in a quite definite
way. Rather than asking God for a favor and accepting a negative answer, they
seek to thwart his will through what seems to them to be their own spiritual
power; rather than waiting for an apparition to be sent to them and then
inquiring if it is malevolent or not, they seek one out. God is offended by
such methods, so the chances of getting him or one of his servants to answer is
nil. The only ones who will respond are malevolent spirits driven mad with fury
about their banishment to Hell, especially a class of angels referred to since
as ancient times as “familiar spirits” because they are familiar with people’s
lives, which it is their function to chronicle. Mediums may con countless
gullible believers with elaborate hoaxes, but in those incidents of genuine
communication with the dead, the mediums and their customers alike are
invariably conned by fallen angels pretending to be the souls of some departed
love one. In doing so, they defile their own souls. This is precisely what
happened to Saul, who committed the terrible sin of suicide in 1 Samuel 31
thanks to his consultation with the Witch of Endor. This is the same reason why
purported eyewitness accounts of the use of Ouija boards and the like always turn out badly. Roughly twenty
years ago, famed host Art Bell started the Coast to Coast radio program about
various unexplained phenomena, which quickly gained an international audience
among overnight listeners. Many of the topics the show still covers are
patently absurd, but not their annual Ghost-to-Ghost show on Halloweens, in
which listeners phone in ghost stories they claim to have witnessed first-hand.
After hearing every one of these broadcasts, not a single Ouija board story
ended well. The most common denominators among the hundreds of ghost stories
discussed there were recourse to Ouija boards or other occult practices, as
well as past suicides as the sites of hauntings. This provides independent
verification of the ancient warnings in the Bible, in addition to establishing
a clear pattern to hauntings over a wide geographical and temporal range. The
same truth is echoed repeatedly in so many horror novels and films in the last
century that it would be pointless to list them. It is far easier to discuss
the handful that ignore these rules, at the peril of their fans. In the vast
majority of cases, the genre serves to reinforce the old saying that Satan is
just a dog on a chain; don’t go near him and he can’t bite you. Silence about
him is a different matter, because warning others that a dangerous dog is in
the neighborhood might keep some of them from blundering into its path.
Dabbling in the occult is a bit like jumping over the neighbor’s fence and
kissing him on the mouth. Séances and other recourses to the occult are a
little like calling a telemarketer at a home, because you can be certain that
they’ll keep bothering you for ages to come.
He may bother you for eternity if you engage in bad
behavior of other kinds, of course. Another function of horror stories is to
prevent people from choosing evil, which dovetails nicely with the
aforementioned function of focusing the perpetrator’s attention on the
afterlife while also preventing injury to their victims. One of the key lessons
of the Ghost-to-Ghost broadcasts is that suicides occur prior to hauntings with
uncanny frequency, which suggests a strong direct cause-and-effect
relationship. The Catholic doctrine that
suicide[6]
is a particularly ugly mortal sin is today quite unpopular, but this
independent evidence may confirm its truth, for the sites of suicides and
murders seem to be contaminated in some way that makes them unusually
vulnerable to ghostly activity. The list of mortal sins for which a man may go
to Hell is far longer, but suicide, murder and recourse to the occult seem to
be unusually conducive to the production of ghosts. In the current political
and religious atmosphere, only two of these are permissible for Hollywood to
address though. The genre is replete with tales of vengeful ghosts seeking to
inform the living about injustices done to them, which can be accommodated by
Catholic doctrine as long as such apparitions are not sought out and allowance
is made for the possibility that they may be lying. Catholicism can also be
reconciled with criticism of another common crime in the genre, that of the mad
scientist playing God. This subgenre was at its peak in the 1950s, when the
public was still acutely aware of the dangers of modern technology, such as the
cold, industrial efficiency of Hitler’s death camps. The threat of the atomic
bomb produced a plethora of giant monster movies that represented a healthy
rejection of scientific arrogance, which had grown in a heresy known as
Scientism by that time. Many of our most famous scientists and skeptics
half-consciously exalted Science into a virtual religion, complete with its own
priesthood (staffed by themselves) and its own false martyrs (like Galileo, who was
never tortured, let alone for his scientific opinions). The World Wars still ought to serve a
humbling lesson about the limits of technology without conscience. It is a
lesson today’s scientists badly need to learn, given their disgusting support
for crimes like abortion and reckless experimentation with genetically modified
foods, human cloning and the like. Likewise, the public has grown complacent
about the omnipresent, man-made danger posed to all life on Earth by nuclear
weapons, which are still waiting in their silos for the next mad dictator to
put to use; in fact, the rising power of the Third World, which I detail in The Retreat of the West, is steadily
increasing that danger unbeknownst to our opinion makers. Since our clergy, our
political leaders and the press have abdicated their responsibility to warn us
about such horrors, the only place left to find rational correction is through
the horror genre, which is the only niche in the mass media still free to
discuss negativity of any kind. Even in this small foothold, the definition of
horror itself is likewise being slowly truncated to the mere murder of adults,
which are now the chief explanations for ghostly activity on the silver screen. Yet it is better than nothing, which is what
the people in charge of warning us against such crimes are doing today.
Another related function of the genre is to provide
justice once these warnings have been ignored and crimes have been committed
The most common examples of this in the horror genre are vengeful ghosts who
seek to avenge their murders, or mad scientists who are killed by their own
creations. The horror genre is one of the few niches in the mass media where
punishment can still be meted out for injustice. This provides a much-needed
escape from the real world, where the good guys rarely win; this is the same
reason why happy endings are common in romance novels and geeks win in teen
movies like Sixteen Candles,
precisely because it doesn’t happen often. It should, according to ordinary
standards of justice, yet does not. One important truth expressed in Catholic
doctrine is that in this life, there is little justice because so few of us
decide to provide it, but in the next life, perfect justice is done: no one is
wronged in the slightest at Judgment Day, while those who go to Heaven or Hell
do so only because they deserve their fates. The horror genre is unique in that
it alone can express the latter truth:
the bad guys may not only pay with their lives, but with their very
souls. In reality, the former doesn’t always happen, but Christ taught that no
one will escape justice in the next life; “thy will” is not always done here,
but it always is in Heaven. There are two places in modern life where we
half-consciously get to wish for both: in the Our Father and in horror movies.
Tales of supernatural vengeance in both this life and the next were more common
a few decades ago, particularly in The
Twilight Zone and Night Gallery,
two television series that were the brainchildren of writer Rod Serling. Miracle at Camafeo, one of the best
episodes of the latter, featured a theme that could hardly be objectionable to
Catholics: a malingerer tries to misuse a Marian shrine to pull off an insurance
scam, but gets more than he bargained for. Today, murder is essentialy the only
crime punished in the genre, precisely because the punishment of other sins
would offend much of our degenerate society – particularly the murder of unborn
children, who are never avenged.
Real horrors like this are occurring because our
civilization has lost its sense of revulsion at the wages of sin, which are
always ugly. There are certain circumstances in which that that ugliness needs
to be unmasked for what it really is, in order to induce people not to act in
an evil way, regardless of whether they are punished or not. It is when we lose our sense of the horrible
that horrors can actually happen. That is why some amount of gore is necessary
in this genre, so that its foulness hammers home the point that certain things
ought not be done. At times, I have
wondered if this is not one of the reasons why God allows the innocent to
suffer injustice in this life – for if the results of sin were not unjust and
foul, then how else would evil men be shamed into repenting of it? There are
circumstances where gore is not warranted, as I will discuss in a moment, but
the one place where it ought to be is in military movies, Westerns and action
films. For decades Hollywood churned out films in which men fell dead from
single gunshots without so much as a groan or spot of blood, but such banal
portrayals of murder, mayhem and warfare tend to encourage them all by
suggesting that they are painless. In real life, the bad guys aren’t always
such poor shots, but entertainment of this kind can at least provide an escape
from reality, in which the good guys don’t always win. Critics often decry the
amount of senseless violence depicted on television, when this is really just a
mirror of the senseless violence that can be found on any inner city street;
the real problem is when violence is not depicted as costly. Death is always
messy and repellent, especially in a human being, because we were designed for better
things. There might be a bit less violence if the military, Western and action
genres depicted it half as honestly as horror stories do.
Another practical use for such stories is to provide
exercise in fighting real-world opponents. In war movies and action films they
are flesh and blood, but in the supernatural genre, they are not. Not everyone
in human history has fought in a military campaign, but we all have to fight
off preternatural predators, the fallen angels who want to claim our souls. Christianity
recognizes this explicitly, for as Paul writes in Ephesians 6:12, “…our struggle is not against flesh and
blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of
this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly
realms.” Now that most of the Catholic clergy in Western civilization have
abdicated their responsibility to teach us all how to fight them off, or even
acknowledge their existence, there are few places we can look to for training
in spiritual resistance. There are still a handful of good orthodox clergy we
can turn to, especially among the priests trained in Africa; there are the
writings of the popes and saints; we also have the sacraments and recourse to
the protection of angels and saints, and then there is the horror genre. There
really is no in-between, because no other religion or Christian denomination
provides a comprehensive theory of the preternatural; Buddhism doesn’t address
it, nor does Islam, nor any Protestant theologian, at least in any great
detail. In their absence, most people are getting their understanding of the
afterlife and the like from Hollywood, which is becoming more unorthodox with
each passing decade. Nevertheless, the horror genre still frequently produces
nuggets of great wisdom which no Christian could ever argue with, such as
Kiefer Sutherland’s exclamation in Flatliners to the effect that “Everything we
do matters!” This is true, for Christ once claimed that we will be judged by
every careless word we ever uttered.[7]
Given this consistent outlook, it is no wonder why Proverbs 14:14 says that “The
backslider gets bored with himself, but the godly man's life is exciting” and why
some wise man once uttered the old saying, “The Devil, above all else, is
bored.”[8]
The godly man’s life may not be pleasant – as Jesus’ was not – but may be
exciting in the sense of an acute awareness of the enormous consequences for
actions in this life. The fight to save the afterlife actually engenders a new
appreciation of this life. And just as we celebrate occasions on which we
bested our enemies to survive, so too do we celebrate victory over the far
worse monsters who threaten our afterlives. This is the underlying cause of
much of the apparent admiration given to monsters, particularly among males.
Boys admire Ghidrah the Three-Headed Monster[9]
or the creatures in Alien for the same reason that hunters mount the heads of
deer: to celebrate their triumph over it. The more fearsome and powerful the
monster, the greater the triumph – all of which is a distant mirror of the
eventual melodramatic triumph of St. Michael and his angels over Lucifer, who
once ranked second only to God. This is also the quite sane psychological
motivation for some, but not all, of the supernatural imagery that used to
accompany heavy metal music. Eddie, the giant undead mascot that Iron Maiden
used to bring out at its shows, was not an example of demonic worship, but of
the same boyish appreciation for monsters; likewise, the late Ronnie James Dio
used to sing of sword-and-sorcery fantasy out of appreciation for the same
genre that the Lord of the Rings springs from, not for the Devil. He was really
a medievalist, just like many of our Thomist philosophers. All of this actually
serves the constructive purpose of preparing men to fight monsters, should they
meet them; the problem is that once men grow to adulthood and their hearts and
minds dull, they don’t always look for monsters in the right places. There is
some genuine demonic influence in the history of rock, but not in the places it
is generally assumed to be.[10]
The same is true of the horror genre, which is why we need a litmus test to
separate the good in it from the evil.
The Detriments of the Dreadful
There are genuine misuses of horror – including a
general risk of giving the Devil too much press, as Gabriel Amorth, the
Vatican’s leading exorcist, has pointed out. He has also warned against the
opposite extreme of ignoring Satan, who prefers to remain hidden because he
cannot operate openly. Where is the dividing line? It may be possible to cross
it in many other ways than I have listed here, because what little I know is
based on casual observation and an amateur’s understanding of theology. We can
enumerate a few clear instances, however, in which the horror genre is clearly
counter-productive, such as when it leads to a mere morbid fascination with
foul things, including death. Despite all of his talents, Edgar Allen Poe was
prone to this – among his other sins, which included incestuous pedophilia
when he married his 13-year-old first cousin. Another literary example might be
vampire writer Anne Rice, who is rumored to sleep in a coffin and has written a
pornographic series of books based on the children’s tale Sleeping Beauty. Morbidity of this kind really boils down to a
focus on negativity for its own sake, rather than the constructive approach of
concentrating on problems in order to fix them. Even worse than this, however,
is the appreciation of evil for its own sake, which is what the love of gore
boils down to. While watching a film in the Tombs of the Blind Dead series from the
‘70s, some friends and I watched an undead member of the Knights Templar take a sword and cut
a guy’s hand off – to which one of them said, “Nice!” This is not the last time
I have noticed human beings rooting for their fellow man to meet the most
grisly ends possible on the big screen. If it were a matter of a particularly
spectacular fiend meeting an equally spectacular death, that would be justice,
which is one of the primary functions of the horror genre. Once you start
rooting for the killers to catch the innocent, then that purpose is turned
upside down; in fact, it is uncomfortably close to the kind of complete
reversal of good and evil that Jesus warns against before discussing the
Unforgivable Sin, the significance of which theologians have long speculated
about. This may be part of an almost imperceptible reversal of standards of
good and evil in the modern entertainment industry, as I discuss in greater
detail in Contempt for Content: Fresh Evidence of a Stale
Culture. In the teen comedy genre,
for example, the trend in the last three decades has been to replace the
underdog-comes-of-age tales of the Breakfast Club era with stories in which the
only the rich, the powerful, the beautiful win, while geeks are depicted as
deserving their inferior status. Essentially, the new moral is that the geek
doesn’t get the girl, who ought to run off with the guy in the black hat. The
equivalent of this in the horror genre may be the disturbing popularity of the
“splatter” genre, which are basically snuff films without real deaths. Films
like Hostel and series like Faces of Death and Saw are geared toward gratifying a truly alarming desire of a
growing number of fans to see innocent people butchered in the most barbaric
ways possible. This is not just diametrically opposed to the kind of healthy
tales of supernatural justice that Rod Serling used to write, but is not even
on the same page as films like Alien
or the original Halloween, where the
whole point was to cheer for the victims to escape.
Real horrors can be perpetuated when the genre is
misused in related ways, such as the obvious danger of suggesting copycat
crimes to evil men. This is one of the many perils of today’s virtual snuff
movies, all of which depict realistic murders that could inspire actual
killers. A less appreciated risk associated with horror, however, is another
type of copycat crime: using knowledge of the occult gained from stories in
order to dabble in it further, instead of fleeing from it. Malachi Martin once
said that some individuals should not witness exorcisms because they may be
more susceptible to the promises made by demons, to the point that some he met
were inspired to ask for possession; intellectuals and those with vivid
imaginations also should not attend them, since the demons can use these faculties
to their advantage, which is why I would never touch the stuff with a ten-foot
pole. These risks are closely related to the warning given by St. Albert Magnus
against fascination with the topic of demonology: “It is taught by the demons,
it teaches about the demons, and it leads to the demons.”[11]
Here we are dealing with disgusting creatures, who want us all dead; curiosity
about them is a lot like being curious about what your favorite celebrity looks
like when they pick their nose. Sooner or later, those who dabble in demonology
end up defiled in both their actions and even their appearances; one of the
most unpleasant side effects when people invite possession, for example, is a
disgusting odor that sometimes follows the possessed around. The whole business
is insalubrious and unpleasant, as Martin put it – but how can a generation
which is rapidly losing it healthy sense of revulsion towards gore retain a
functional level of disgust? For that
matter, if we are truly undergoing a complete reversal in cinematic morals to
the point where more of us are cheering for killers to succeed, then how can we
fend off a collapse in actual morals in real-life situations? The answer is
that we are not.
These
changes in our moral standards could not succeed, however, if people clung to
the orthodox viewpoints on the afterlife, which is precisely why they are
coming up with new ones to suit themselves. Hollywood unconsciously supports
Christian morals at times, as discussed earlier, but explicitly making films in
which human beings go to Hell for other things that the Catholic Church teaches
are mortal sins, like adultery, is simply more out of the question today than
ever before. If anything, the trend of the whole genre is in the wrong direction,
with the moralistic tales of justice found in The Twilight Zone slowly being replaced with snuff films like The Poughkeepsie Tapes. There is still
plenty of old-fashioned horror entertainment to be found, but an increasing
share of it expounds a view of the afterlife that is no longer in accord with
reality. One example is 2001 film The
Others, in which Nicole Kidman and
her family discover they are ghosts, but end by chanting that “no one knows”
how the afterlife works. This is simply factually untrue, because the Catholic
Church has built an immense storehouse of knowledge about all topics
supernatural in the last two thousand years; I don’t say this out of pride
because I am a Catholic, but because I had to swallowed my pride and become a
Catholic when I encountered the preponderant weight of evidence for Catholicism
in every area of theology. Here’s a case in point: while thumbing through
random books on religion in a nearby Catholic library a decade ago, I found a
reprint of an ancient book on exorcisms. I read a few pages and immediately
received a clear (and terrifying) explanation of why certain some “psychics”
have knowledge that can lead police to crime scenes, which is a phenomenon that
has gained some public notoriety since the ‘70s. The conventional wisdom of today is that it
arises from psychic abilities within the individuals, but the conventional
wisdom of our ancestors was that in at least some cases, it is the result of
knowledge supplied by demons with nefarious ends in mind. This is but one of countless examples in which
Catholic insight into supernatural matters was far more advanced a thousand
years ago than the common understanding of it today. Another case is point is
Martin’s Hostage to the Devil, a study
of five actual exorcisms performed in America, which contains numerous patterns
found in possession which aren’t cited in the literature of any other church.[12]
We don’t understand the rules perfectly - which is exactly what we ought to
expect, for some of the concepts involved may too vast for our finite brains to
handle. Furthermore, putting yourselves in the shoes of an angel may be akin to
trying to imagine what it is like to be a squirrel; we can probably make some
educated guesses about the thoughts we might have, but others would probably be
completely alien to us. Yet we understand as much as we need to in order to
make into Heaven. As a practical matter, there simply isn’t any other
organization on the planet which has accumulated as much detailed evidence on
the supernatural as the Catholic Church, nor would it be possible for any other
to amass as much in the lifetime of our grandchildren’s grandchildren.
We
have a great deal of evidence about the afterlife and what it takes to get
there, but in many cases, people simply don’t like it. This is why in
recent times, a vague consensus has been forged among many paranormal
investigators and the creative artists in the horror genre surrounding psychic
and ghostly phenomena. As Martin warned before his death, we cannot be sure
that some psychic abilities do not arise from a person’s own innate powers, but
he and his fellow exorcists knew from direct experience that in many cases
demons either produce the phenomena for them or stimulate the victim’s innate
faculties. It is much more pleasant for investigators to hear that extra sensory
perception (ESP) and the like usually arises from within, for that is more
satisfying to the ego and removes the whole unpleasant issue of fallen angels.
In the cases of genuine gifts, it also removes any need to thank God for their
benefits. Likewise, the new conventional wisdom is that ghosts are the spirits
of people who don’t realize they are dead. There may be spirits out there who
want people to think that because it works to their benefit, but the orthodox
view since time immemorial was that people always know explicitly where they
are headed from the moment they die. Certain angels know it as well and aren’t
happy at all; in fact, they have “gone postal” from the knowledge and are
seeking to drag all of Creation down with them. Horror fiction that falsely
depicts the rules by which they operate is terribly dangerous because it gives
them a foothold with which to work on people’s minds. Since time immemorial
incidents have been reported of apparitions drawing attention to some
unfinished business, such as an unsolved crime or unburied bones, but that does
not signify in the least that the person’s spirit is actually trapped there; if
they are allowed to appear, it is because they were sent by God. If they were
not sent by God we’ve got a problem, because there is no in-between in the
afterlife. Hauntings may in fact be conducted by familiar spirits imitating a
dead person, or by other spirits who reenact previous events there for the
sheer pleasure of disturbing human beings. In such cases, the last thing you
want to do is set them free. If they deserve to be free, then they already are –
but why would they want to come back here once they’ve tasted Heaven?
Defensive measures are required because these
preternatural predators are quite real and want us all very dead for eternity,
but there is also a risk of overstating the problem. The New Testament mentions
that there are more angels on God’s side than on those of the demons, which is
Good News – as long as you’re on his side. The problem is that some of us are
playing for the other team, while others waver in their allegiances and put
themselves within reach of that “dog on a chain,"as I have been guilty of in
the past. If we stay on his side, then we have ways of cultivating the
protection of the angels and the saints, as well as protecting ourselves
through the sacraments. One of the greatest errors in modern horror stories is
to ignore the existence of such supernatural aids, let alone acknowledge their
superior strength. Of course, if you’re a bad angel, it is preferable to ignore
their existence, or if that fails, to deny their strength. When writing fiction
about the Devil, it is necessary for the sake of realism to paint him as
character who in turns like to paint himself as an overwhelming, unstoppable
force. Haven’t all tyrants and bullies in history imitated him by doing the
same? A subtle but crucial distinction must be made here, however, between
saying that he truly projects the caricature and saying that the caricature is
true. A handful of supernatural fiction, such as the films Hellraiser III and The Ninth Gate
and Stephen King’s short story Children
of the Corn, are guilty of falling into the latter category. King wrote in his classic work on the
horror genre, Danse Macabre, that
this is the one type of fiction where you can get away with a saying that the
world really is going to Hell in a hand basket[13]
In order to make the threats implicit in the horror genre credible, bad endings
are a necessity now and then, like the fate the main character in King’s novel Pet Sematary faces for failing to resist
temptation. In reality, Satan also wins sometimes, as we can see with our own
eyes in the wretched state of our world. Yet there is a difference between
saying that he sometimes wins and saying that he always wins, or that he will
win the last battle at the end of time. It would truly be a horror beyond
reckoning if Satan’s own description of himself were true, but thankfully it is
not, regardless of what creative artists sometimes half-consciously say about
him. Not only is he doomed to lose his foothold on earth, but he isn’t even the
strongest angel, for that honor now goes to St. Michael.
The ultimate potential for horror consists not in a
final victory for the Devil, but in the possibility that we may be among the
humans he takes away as his prey before his reign as Prince of This World comes
to an end. Chesterton once lamented that too many modern novelists wrote tales
about unrealistic men in mundane circumstances, when what the people of his day
wanted were tales that upheld ancient morals, of ordinary men placed in
extraordinary circumstances. That was true in his day, but he did not live to
see the degeneration he witnessed among the upper class percolate down to the common
man he defended so often; he feared this possibility, but did not see it become
a terrible reality in our day. If one wants to uphold ancient morals, one
perfectly effective way is to tell a cautionary tale of horror fiction –
particular if it is set in the one institution that has upheld those morals for
so long, the Catholic Church. Perhaps that is why, to this day, the lion’s
share of tales of the supernatural involve Catholic priests and cathedrals
rather than those of any other denomination or religion; the others lack simple
lack credibility in the world of fiction precisely because, as many writers
instinctively know (whether they would amid it or not), it is the only one with
a permanent grant of supernatural authority.
Many of those who staff it no longer uphold those old morals though, at
precisely the same point in history when the public’s taste in horror entertainment
is undergoing a profound and disturbing change to match its change in morals.
Years ago, I wrote a few horror novels and almost sold one to a major
publishing house, before I realized that the cost of success might be giving
the public poison in the form of fiction. There are plenty of real horrors in
the world, but none as frightening as this: our sense of what horror is has
been muted, muffled and mutated in the course of one generation, to the point
where it is almost sympathetic to evil. Whether it is substitution of false rules,
fascination with gore, virtual snuff films, cheering for villains or giving
credence to the Devil’s claims of infallibility, the misuses of horror fiction
are now more prominent than ever before. The dividing lines between good and
evil are not blurring, but our vision is – which is not surprising, given that
our culture is today so distant from orthodox religion. Like sheep who have
wandered from their shepherd, we have moved so far from the protection of our
angels that we know next to nothing about them, nor do we want to hear what the
God they report to wants of us. Some people are blissfully ignorant of the
whole matter, like an acquaintance of mine, who once proudly proclaimed that
she had no demons, while routinely engaging in behavior that demons would
applaud. Perhaps they already had her and didn’t want to upset their next meal
before the slaughter. In a similar sense, much of Western civilization is today
blithely fulfilling the ancient saying, “The Church is the mother of
prosperity, and the daughter killed the mother.” Our very prosperity is killing
our souls, by spoiling us to the point of ignoring the end purposes of life, or
worse yet, weakening us to the point where only the shock value of breaking
taboos can bring us fleeting thrills. As Martin pointed out, when a man sells
his soul, he may continue prospering in other areas of life, but becomes
desensitized to evil, which makes him less shocked at evils committed by either
himself or others; hate is not equivalent to anger, but is much closer to the
kind of cold indifference that serial killers and the mad scientists among the
Nazis evinced for human life. To such people, Satan might not seem like such a
bad guy and his code of morality might have something going for it. If you find
yourself sympathizing with any of these positions, it is time to shudder,
because you are losing your soul as we speak. Hundreds of millions of other
people living today appear to be willing to join you.
If you think
you’re not such a bad guy, think again, because that depends on how you define bad.
If the consistent code of morality contained in the Bible, the writings of the
saints and documents like the Catechism of the Council of Trent is correct,
then we are all slowly becoming
villains. Except for a few bright spots in the Third World where the Church is
growing like wildfire, it is possible to prove statistically beyond any shadow
of a doubt that the entire Western world is degenerating at a rapid pace, if
judged by this particular code. The range of mortal sins that are routinely
practiced today is sufficient to cover almost everyone on both the left and
right of the political spectrum, like charging unjust prices, paying unjust
wages, premarital sex, contraception, divorce, fighting unjust wars and scores
of others which are universally popular in opinion polls. It is a historical
fact that our ancestors considered them all to be scourges, particularly
abortion. This unspeakable crime has claimed more than one billion lives of
unborn children in the last forty years, in the greatest holocaust in human
history. It doesn’t get much more nightmarish than a billion souls being
murdered in cold blood by their own mothers for the sake of money. The
frightening fact all Westerners must face is this: if Catholicism is true, then
we are all in deep trouble. That includes the vast majority of Catholics and
their clergy, who are guilty of heresy by disagreeing with the Church on issues
like these and compound it with the sin of sacrilege by taking Eucharist
anyways. If someone remained attached to Catholic doctrine, they might
recognize that this Falling Away was foretold long ago, as was the
proliferation of atheists and other such phenomena that were unheard of not
long ago; they might also heed the warnings of eventual punishment for such
sins, as Martin says that St. Mary gave at Fatima. For the victims of abortion,
the Apocalypse has already come; for those of us who have failed to resist this
and other innumerable evils, it is one day closer than it was before. Today,
almost all of us are opposed to Christianity – particularly the members of the so-called
Religious Right, who are often little more than modern incarnations of the
Pharisees. If Jesus ever showed his face, far too many of us would crucify him
all over again, particularly those who claim to be his followers. If the
Catholic Church really does speak for him, then opposing its code of morality
is tantamount to rejecting Jesus himself, which is precisely what most of us
are doing these days. The worst fate in any supernatural tale is not to be
killed, but to become evil; this deep, uniquely human fear is one of the
reasons that vampire and werewolf stories are so popular, despite the fact that
they don’t exist. Demons, however, do exist and their primary goal is to transform
us into monsters by enticing us to choose evil of our own free will. The
ultimate horror story is that far too many of us are heeding their call and
thereby making ourselves enemies of God. If you’re opposed to him, then the
Gospel must seem like very Bad News indeed, which is precisely why people only
want to hear ineffectual, vague, watered down versions of it today. If we
become villains, then we will ultimately lose. As Keanu Reeves tells Satan in The Devil’s Advocate, the last chapter
of Revelation says it all: “You lose.” For those on the primrose path, this
will be the ultimate horror story.
The writer is a former journalist with a Bachelor’s in
journalism and a Master’s in history from the State University of New York at
Brockport, with a focus on American foreign policy and specializations in
U.S.-Latin American relations and counterinsurgency history. He has worked as a
paid foreign policy columnist for several newspapers and has credit towards a doctorate
in Latin America history. He is a convert to Catholicism from atheism and has
been an avid reader of textbooks on topics ranging from particle physics to
psychology to economics since age 9.
[1]
See the essay titled “The Red Angel” in Chesterton, G. K, 1955, Tremendous
Trifles. Sheed and Ward: New York.
[2]
Mark 1:48.
[3] Genesis
18:20, 19:13; Deuteronomy 24:14-5; James 5:4.
[5] A
good starting point is Cruz, Joan Carroll,1977, The Incorruptibles: A Study
of the Incorruption of the Bodies of Various Catholic Saints And Beati.
Tan: Rockford, Illinois.
[6] It
is important to keep in mind the caveat to that doctrine, that we must not despair
for their souls, becaue we cannot discount the possibility that they repented
at the very last nanosecond of their decision.
[7] Matthew
12:36-37.
[8] p.
201, May, William F., 1967, A Catalogue of Sins: A Contemporary Examination
of Christian Conscience. Holt, Rinehart and Winston: New York.
[9] I
thought about mentioning his nemesis, Godzilla, but he became a heroic
character in the early Japanese monster movies, which is a more complex case
beyond the scope of this discussion.
[10]
For a good reference on the inside stories of the occult in rock history, see
Patterson, R. Gary, 2004, Take a Walk on the Dark Side: Rock and Roll Myths,
Legends and Curses. Fireside: New York.
[11]
See the Catholic Encyclopedia web page titled “Demonology,” available at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04713a.htm .
[12]
One of the cases revolves around a priest whose superior turned out to be
possessed as well; I’m not sure if he is counted among the five or not, so
there may actually be six cases discussed in the book. See Martin, Malachi, 1976, Hostage to the Devil: The Possession and Exorcism of Five Living
Americans. Reader's Digest Press: New York.
[13] I
am paraphrasing his more colorful language. See King, Stephen, 1981, Danse Macabre.
Berkley Books: New York.
