The Uncanny Convergence of Religion and Horror

Reflections on a haunted universe, with help from the ancient Babylonians, the ancient Greeks, the Bible, H. P. Lovecraft, Rudolf Otto, and C. S. Lewis

In 2012 my friend Jason V. Brock invited me to write something for the second issue of his newly launched journal Nameless. I sent him the following essay. At that time I was in process of organizing the third installment of an annual horror film festival that I had co-founded in Waco, Texas, so that’s what the opening lines are talking about.

For the republication of this piece here in Living into the Dark, I have given the text a stylistic update and revised some of the content for more vivid expression. I have also appended some new thoughts to the end.

Things That Should Not Be: The Uncanny Convergence of Religion and Horror

Originally published in Nameless, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 2012)

Yesterday I gave an interview to the entertainment editor at my local daily newspaper about the imminent third installment of an annual horror film festival that I created a couple of years ago. The festival's theme this year is “Horror and Apocalypse,” and one of the questions the editor asked me was an apocalypse-centric variation on a question that I am always asked whenever I talk about my long-running focus on the intersection of horror with any aspect of religion: “What is the connection between horror and the apocalypse? What do they really have to do with each other?”

This came just a few days after I gave an interview for Expanding Mind, Erik Davis’s wonderful podcast (with co-host Maja D’Aoust) devoted to exploring “the cultures of consciousness: magic, religion, psychology, technology.” A large part of that one involved a discussion of why religion and horror have emerged as centrally related to each other in my thinking and writing. This in turn came not long after my friend and fellow horror writer T. E. Grau asked me something similar when interviewing me for his blog. It also came up not long ago when I talked to the Lovecraft News Network and to John Morehead for his Theofantastique blog. Why religion and horror? Why these two together? How are they connected? What has led to my dual interest in both and my authorial tactic of using each to talk about the other?

The more I am asked this question, the more my answer, however long and involved it may be on the surface, boils down to the same short and semi-rhetorical response: “How and why not?” In other words, how are horror and religion not related, fused, intertwined? How are they not bound together in a synergy and symbiosis so total and profound as to make the one not even discussable in the absence of the other? To me the connection is so obvious, blatant, and patent that I truly have to struggle to understand and communicate with those who do not see it. And those who do not see it are legion. (I hasten to add that such people are almost never my interviewers, whose purpose in asking me about it is simply to grease the wheels of the conversation.) In fact, for many people the very idea of talking about horror in connection with religion is shocking. For some it is outright anathema. This in itself says something important about the religion/horror nexus, and about the respective qualities and meanings of both horror and religious experience.